PARISIAN SALONS UNDER THE THIRD REPUBLIC
Madame de Caillavet’s salon was certainly one of the most influential
among political and literary men of the Third Republic. She was one of
the leading women of that period, was moreover an excellent hostess,
and, thanks to the continual presence of Anatole France in her house,
she succeeded in attracting many notables to her salon. Journalists
composed the majority of her visitors, and diplomats occasionally came
to hear the last news of the day, especially whilst the Dreyfus
agitation lasted. Dramatists were always to be found at her receptions,
colleagues of her son Gaston de Caillavet, the author of so many amusing
comedies, whose collaborator, the Marquis de Flers, the husband of
Sardou’s daughter, was also among the number of people who seldom missed
these friendly gatherings. But in spite of this, and notwithstanding the
number of clever men and pretty and amiable women who clustered around
her, to the eyes of a keen observer there was always something Bohemian
about her receptions. It was not the salon of a _grande dame_, and it
was no longer that of a bourgeoise of olden times: it was essentially
modern, like the Republic itself.
Far different from it was the house of Madame Ménard Dorian, also one of
the feminine stars of the Republic. Madame Dorian was a charming woman,
who had received an excellent education, and who, coming as she did from
an old bourgeois stock, never pretended to be aught else than what she
was by birth. She was extremely intelligent, very broad in her opinions,
and with many advanced ideas in regard to religion and politics; above
everything else, she was a lady in her manners, her general behaviour,
and her tastes. Very rich, she possessed a lovely house in the Rue de la
Faisanderie, which she had furnished with extreme taste and where she
used to give receptions as sumptuous as they were pleasant.
There one could meet, together with some of those who frequented the
salon of Madame de Caillavet and other Republican hostesses of the same
kind, persons belonging to other classes, and forming part of the
aristocratic circle of Paris. Academicians frequented it, and
diplomatists were generally eager to be introduced to Madame Ménard
Dorian, where they ran no risk of meeting people they would not have
cared to become acquainted with, and where they could, on the other
hand, get an idea as to what was going on in Republican circles. Madame
Dorian had been a Dreyfusard, but she had been so moderately and in a
ladylike way. Her salon was something like the one of Madame Geoffrin in
the eighteenth century, with the exception that no one would have dared
to say about it what the Marquise du Deffand had told of the former,
that it was “une omelette au lard.” One gossiped in it, in a mild way,
and became interested in the literary movement of the day, perhaps even
more than in the political one.
M. Ménard Dorian used to put in an appearance at his wife’s receptions
now and then, when he was not too busy to do so. He was a quiet,
pleasant little man, liked by everybody, and especially by ladies, who
always found him most polite and amiable to them. An evening party or
dinner given in the Hotel de la Rue de la Faisanderie was always sure to
be a meeting place for intelligent and clever people, and no one who had
once been asked ever regretted it, but on the contrary was always most
eager for the invitation to be repeated.
M. Ménard Dorian is now dead, and his widow only sees her friends
occasionally, and in a quiet fashion, having refrained from opening
again the hospitable doors of her house so freely as in former years.
But she has remained the same amiable woman she always was, and
certainly among the Republican ladies of the present day she deserves to
rank first. She would have graced the Court of any European monarch.
Madame Dorian had one daughter who had been married to Georges Hugo, the
grandson of Victor Hugo. That marriage ended in a catastrophe and a
divorce, after which the young Hugo married the first cousin of
Mademoiselle Dorian, who had attracted his fancy one morning when he had
met her at his mother-in-law’s, together with her husband, the sculptor
Ajalbert.
The daughter of the charming Madame Dorian had a curious personality;
she seemed to take a vicious pleasure in thwarting her parents, and
making herself disagreeable to them whenever she found the opportunity.
She occupied a flat in their house, the Hotel de la Rue de la
Faisanderie, and on the evenings when her father and mother gave
receptions at which the partisans of Captain Dreyfus, such as Colonel,
later on General, Picquart, the Zolas, and their circle of friends were
honoured guests, Madame Hugo used to invite people such as Drumont and
the strongest anti-Semites of Paris, so that several times queer
situations arose, and the staunchest Dreyfusards entered by mistake the
apartment of one of their worst enemies, whilst one evening Henri
Rochefort himself, who for the world would not be seen at Madame Ménard
Dorian’s, was ushered into her drawing-room by a footman who did not
know him by sight.
That sort of thing, however, could not go on for any length of time, and
when Pauline Hugo left the house of her parents, her departure was a
relief to them. But even after her marriage to Herman Paul, after her
divorce and Paul’s, she did not become reconciled to her father and
mother.
Georges Hugo’s sister, Jeanne, was also a strange kind of person. She
married when quite young, Leon Daudet, the son of Alphonse Daudet, and
very soon ran away from him with the explorer Charcot. It was said that
Daudet was delighted when he divorced her, as they had scarcely been a
single day without quarrelling since they married, and, although a
fervent Catholic, he hastened to take to himself another wife.
The mother of Leon Daudet, Madame Alphonse Daudet, is also a celebrity
in her way, and gives receptions at which the best society of Paris can
be met. She has entirely renounced her bourgeois origin, and only talks
of Dukes and Duchesses. She labels herself a Clerical by conviction and
a Royalist by sympathy, and frequents the houses of great ladies, such
as the Duchesse de Rohan or the Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles. Her second
son, Lucien Daudet is a devoted admirer of the Empress Eugénie. Among
Republican hostesses I haven’t yet mentioned Madame Psichari, the
daughter of Ernest Renan. She has inherited the intelligence and the art
of conversation of her father, and is one of the most distinguished
women of modern France. At her house can be met most of the members of
the French Academy, and nearly all the prominent literary men in Paris.
Her receptions are perhaps a shade dull, and more or less solemn, but
always instructive and always interesting. Her personality was always
singularly attractive, and inspired great respect, because her errors of
judgment when they occurred were always sincere.
Madame Psichari was one of the victims of the divorce mania that has
lately taken hold of Parisian society, and, to the great astonishment of
her numerous friends, after more than thirty years’ matrimony she
applied for a decree. She had one son, who occupied for a few days the
attention of Paris, when at twenty years old he married the daughter of
Anatole France, nearly seventeen years his senior, to the chagrin of
both their families.
Madame Zola, also, used to receive her friends on Saturdays in her
little flat in the Rue de Rome. At her house could be met all the
principal actors in the Dreyfus drama, including its hero. I must here
mention one fact that is very little known, that Zola, far from making
money out of the Dreyfus affair, as it was said everywhere that he had
done, lost a great deal by his attitude in regard to it. His novels,
instead of being read more than had been the case formerly, were on the
contrary boycotted, and several important papers for which he wrote
articles, and which published his works before they came out in volume
form, closed their doors to him after the letter “J’accuse,” for which
he was sent before a jury at first and to exile afterwards.
Emile Zola died, relatively, a poor man, and his widow found herself
reduced to almost embarrassed circumstances after his death. She sold a
great deal of the furniture which he had collected, gave up to the State
in return for a modest remuneration the villa of Médan, where he had
lived for so many years, and arranged her existence on quite a different
scale from that which had been her custom before her widowhood. Zola, as
well as Captain Dreyfus himself, were the only two people who did not
profit by the clamour which arose around them and around their actions.
Talking about Dreyfus reminds me of an incident in his story which, so
far, I believe, has never been told. When he was languishing on the
barren rock called the Devil’s Island, a Russian who had had occasion to
approach the Tsar spoke to Mathieu Dreyfus, the Captain’s brother, and
advised him to appeal to the Russian Sovereign to intercede in favour of
the Captain. Mathieu Dreyfus said that he would consult his
sister-in-law, and reply in a few days. When these days had elapsed, he
came back and told the man who had made the proposition that neither
Madame Dreyfus, nor himself, thought that they had the moral right to
apply to a foreign Monarch, or to ask his intervention in a case that
was too important for France not to allow her to dispose of it herself.
In general the dignity displayed by the whole Dreyfus family cannot
sufficiently be praised; they all unanimously showed themselves superior
to the misfortunes which assailed them.
So far all the hostesses of whom I have spoken were long past middle
age, but there was another lady, young and beautiful, with a shade of
eccentricity in her manners, who also aspired to have a salon, and to be
able to dictate to those who visited it, or at least to suggest to them
the opinions they ought to have. It was the Comtesse Mathieu de
Noailles, a Roumanian by birth, coming from the family of the Princes of
Brancovan, whose mother had been very well known in London, where her
father, Musurus Pasha, had occupied for long the post of Turkish
Ambassador. The Princesse de Brancovan was one of the best musicians of
her generation, and her wonderful talent for the piano was famous among
her acquaintances. She had been handsome, and her daughters had
inherited her loveliness as well as her intellectual gifts. The eldest
one, whose large dowry secured her an entrance into the ancient
aristocratic family of the Ducs de Noailles, has made for herself a name
among the poets of modern France Her books have been widely read, and
have had a great success, which they deserved, because there was some
really genuine poetic inspiration in them. Madame de Noailles has
succumbed to the vogue of eccentricity; she wears long floating white
garments which trail out behind and give her the appearance of a fairy
from the children’s tales. She speaks languidly, as if sick of a world
she would really be very sorry to leave, and looks disdainfully at
humanity in general.
The Comtesse de Noailles used to give parties, during which she recited
some of her own poetry, and allowed her great friend and admirer, the
Comte Robert de Montesquieu, to read his. She did not trouble much about
her guests, merely smiled on them when they arrived, and softly sighed
when she saw them going away. She glided about her lovely rooms, as the
ghost of something too beautiful to be real, and she seemed to be
interested in nothing that did not concern her personally, or that had
no association with her books or poems.
Her receptions were singularly eclectic. Apart from the family, friends
and relations of the Noailles, one met people who belonged to an
entirely different grade--journalists, artists, politicians, even those
of an advanced shade; members of the Republican government, and
diplomats or foreigners happening to be in Paris. She received them all
with the utmost grace, and liked to see them surround her, like the
satellites of her fame and of her high social position. In its way her
vanity was as remarkable as it was charming.
Madame de Noailles composed poems, the Comtesse de Greffuhle wrote
operas and sonatas with decided talent. Madame de Greffuhle has played,
and is playing still, a very important part in Parisian society. She was
by birth a Princess de Chimay, and had married, without dower, the Count
Greffuhle, whose fortune was supposed to be one of the largest in
France, and had at once begun to exercise a considerable influence in
the circles in which she moved. She was beautiful, intelligent, had
great tact, and a considerable knowledge of the world, liked to surround
herself with artists and musicians, to organise exhibitions of works of
art, and to help her neighbour as much as she could.
Her salon was not the meeting-place of the pure Faubourg St. Germain,
neither was it, on the other hand, exclusively Republican. But it
afforded a neutral ground to men belonging to both parties, and her
receptions were never dull nor banal, but on the contrary always
interesting and pleasant. She possessed a lovely country place near
Paris, called Bois Boudran, where she entertained most sumptuously, and
where she often welcomed foreign Sovereigns or members of Royal houses,
when they happened to come to France. Madame de Greffuhle was a woman
essentially made for society, who could never have lived outside it. She
described herself better than anyone else could have done one day when
she was asked to write her name on the visitors’ book of the Phare
d’Ailly, near Dieppe, where some friends had taken her. She signed
“Chimay Greffuhle, dame de qualité,” thus admitting that she had no
pretensions to be considered a _grande dame_.
The Baron Henri de Rothschild was also “un écrivain amateur,” with more
pretensions to literary talent than perhaps that talent deserved. He had
married Mlle. Weiswiller, who is supposed to be one of the best-dressed
women in Paris, and whose name appears prominently in all the chronicles
of the _Figaro_ or the _Gaulois_. The couple entertain with the
hospitality for which their family has always been famous, and the Baron
has made for himself a name among the benefactors of the Paris poor, for
whom he does a great deal. He has studied medicine and even practised it
with all the zeal of a millionaire who believes himself to have a
vocation for some kind of science.
Baron Henri is an exceedingly pleasant man, cultured, and well read,
capable of most entertaining conversation on a variety of topics. The
receptions which he gives, and of which his wife helps him to do the
honours with an exquisite grace, are the meeting-place of almost all the
distinguished men of scientific and literary Paris. Members of the
government can be met at them, but though his salon is known to be
Liberal in its opinions, it is yet one at which politics have never
played a part or been discussed. The guests succeeded in avoiding them
even at the time of the Dreyfus affair, during which the Rothschilds
adopted an entirely passive and impartial attitude.
Talking of politics makes me think of a house where they were always
very prominent, and almost the only subject of conversation. It was the
house of M. Rouvier, one of the ablest politicians whom France has seen
in recent times, who had occupied, more than once, important State
positions, and who was always spoken of, among his friends, as a
possible President of the Republic. M. Rouvier’s was a most complicated
mind. He had considerable capacity, an intelligence far above the
average, great ambition, and absolutely no vanity, perhaps because he
had a full consciousness of his strength and of his worth, in presence
of the lesser intelligences with which he was surrounded.
He had made his way with the help of a good deal of luck, and perhaps
more determination than is generally met with. There was one moment in
his life when he nearly became one of the victims of the Panama scandal,
but he succeeded in emerging quite unharmed. As a financier, he very
nearly approached genius, and when he left office almost all the large
banks in France entreated him to join their board. He became director of
a large financial establishment, which he managed with the intelligence
and knowledge that he brought into everything which he attempted. But
although he had many partisans and more friends than could have been
expected in a man who had held the difficult posts which he had
successfully occupied; though he was in a certain sense a sort of small
king, feared by most of the politicians who ruled France or aspired to
do so, he always regretted that he had been obliged to retire from the
government of his country. When he died, he was about to put forward his
candidature to the Presidency of the Republic, in opposition to that of
M. Poincaré or any other of the probable successors of M. Fallières at
the end of the latter’s septenary.
M. Rouvier had been twice married. His first wife was the famous
sculptor known as Claude Vignon, whose first husband was l’Abbé
Constant, an unfrocked priest, who was later on to be so well known by
the name of Eliphas Lévy, and who was considered to be the greatest
master in occult sciences that the world possessed. I met Eliphas Lévy
more than once, and I was always extremely interested in him. He had a
most venerable appearance, with his long white beard, and of all the
indulgent men I have ever met he was the one who practised that virtue
to the largest extent. He lived absorbed in his studies of high magic,
but would always carefully avoid talking on the subject, save with his
most intimate friends. He was called uncanny, I don’t know why, because
he certainly had the most peaceful countenance possible, but a certain
prejudice used to cling to him or rather existed against him at the time
I knew him; probably because the fact of a priest having given up his
profession appeared still to be something quite dreadful in France.
Madame Constant, or Claude Vignon as she was generally called, had
greatly contributed to the unfrocking of her husband, but though he had
loved her passionately, she had very soon tired of him, and the couple
separated, never to meet again so long as they lived. She married
Rouvier, to whom she brought the very large fortune she possessed, but
died not long after, leaving one son, with whom his father never could
get along, and whom one never met at his house.
The second Madame Rouvier was a small, slight woman, with golden curls,
a most pleasant manner, and a charming conversationalist. She aided her
husband quite admirably, interested herself in his political career and
successes, and was perhaps even more ambitious than he. The couple lived
in a splendid establishment which they possessed at Neuilly, on the
outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, where they often entertained, and
where generally the latest news of the day was to be heard. No political
man would have dared to ignore M. Rouvier and his wife, and their salon
has been more than once called the “succursale du Sénat,” of which he
was a member. Diplomats also were to be met in their house; and it was,
indeed, frequented by almost everybody of note in Paris.